CyHawk_Cub wrote:I'm not a fan of the messenger, but this is an accurate point, I think.

Definitely; I felt the same thing reading the article about the DeVos/Trump/Prince connections to Russia in the other thread. This administration's failings and crimes are so normalized to the point that any expose feels like something we already know, whether somebody supports or opposed Trump. The shady horsefeathers already appalls those against him, and already is approved or tolerated by the people who support him, so yet another story about murky business dealings, or tax records, or election tampering is just something to add to the enormous pile. Short of revealing something like him hunting and eating children for sport, it's just not going to move the needle.

Well, that DeVos/Trump/Prince stuff all WAS stuff we already knew. I couldn't have been the only person here who read that Slate article forever ago, right?

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"None of these signal alarm bells to me"-Boris"Sublime was driven by their frontman, who was, quite probably, a musical savant." -RIP Stannis(Formerly Diceman4221)

CyHawk_Cub wrote:I'm not a fan of the messenger, but this is an accurate point, I think.

Definitely; I felt the same thing reading the article about the DeVos/Trump/Prince connections to Russia in the other thread. This administration's failings and crimes are so normalized to the point that any expose feels like something we already know, whether somebody supports or opposed Trump. The shady horsefeathers already appalls those against him, and already is approved or tolerated by the people who support him, so yet another story about murky business dealings, or tax records, or election tampering is just something to add to the enormous pile. Short of revealing something like him hunting and eating children for sport, it's just not going to move the needle.

Well, that DeVos/Trump/Prince stuff all WAS stuff we already knew. I couldn't have been the only person here who read that Slate article forever ago, right?

I remember there being a lot of REALLY obvious smoke before (especially in regards to Prince), but hadn't seen it laid out like that.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has allowed a private city recycling hauler to divert tons of residential plastics and paper into landfills the company owns, costing taxpayers twice and aggravating Chicago’s worst-in-the-nation recycling rate, a Better Government Association investigation has found.

This creates a distorted scenario under which the plastic, glass and metals of residents on the Northwest and Far South sides — areas where Texas-based Waste Management, Inc. holds the city’s recycling contract — are far more likely than other Chicagoans to see their discarded recycling dispatched to garbage dumps.

Under city rules, one plastic bag or food item improperly placed in a recycling bin could mean the whole bin is labeled “grossly contaminated” and its contents taken to a landfill.

Waste Management is the only recycling hauler that operates a for-profit landfill where a portion of the city’s garbage is dumped.

That means the company — which gets paid city recycling fees whether its crews pick up a bin or tag it — gets paid again on those occasions when the contents of tagged bins are taken by city trash crews to its landfill, the BGA investigation found.

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show. It is the calf-bound, gilt-edged bible of neoliberal meritocracy. The weirdest thing about it is that this dyed-in-the-wool conservative woman (she started her career at the National Review) somehow became the irreproachable darling of New York media...

For all their hanging out among the counterculturalists and jazz musicians and rock stars and hippies and desperately trying to be cool, I don’t think Joan Didion, or Capote, Updike, Wolfe, et al., ever wanted an egalitarian society. American writers like to pretend that their work is apolitical; it’s hard to imagine what the American equivalent of Marquez or Václav Havel might be. But no writing is apolitical. Didion and her cohort wanted a society where people like themselves could keep comfortably chronicling the interesting inferiorities of those in the classes below their own.

I regret to inform you that the national mainstream media is at it again: willingly giving a platform to white nationalists.

On this morning’s TODAY show, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed the head of Identity Evropa, a racist group that describes itself as “identitarian” because it promotes white European “identity,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. TODAY framed the report as exposing a frightening new group attempting to recruit on college campuses, but the package does very little to actively push back on the group’s leader, Patrick Casey.

Alexander’s questions are tepid at best. When Alexander points out that you have to be white and non-Jewish to join the group, he asks: “Why isn’t that racist?” Casey responds that the group is “trying to move beyond the paradigm that includes buzzwords like ‘racist.’” He argues it is “identitarian,” to discriminate on the basis of identity, not racism. Presumably, Alexander thinks that Casey’s argument is so poor that its failure speaks for itself, that the viewer will be able to see how thin and unconvincing this argument is. He goes on to say this is how these groups “disguise” their white supremacist views.

But Alexander fails to understand that he hasn’t really challenged Casey at all by pointing out they’re racist, not just “identitarian.” Of course they horsefeathering are! Identity Evropa isn’t scary because it’s tricking non-racists into supporting racist viewpoints through clever rhetoric, it’s scary because it’s organizing people who were already very racist to intimidate and harm people of color in a way that’s more compatible with, say, mainstream media coverage, than to explicitly identify as white supremacists. As the Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill reported, Identity Evropa “participated in the violent clashes at Charlottesville” but has since attempted to rebrand as more clean-cut. There’s a reason these guys get more coverage than your average Klan.

Alexander also asks in the interview: “Isn’t America’s diversity its greatest strength?” Casey replies that “that’s just a mantra that people repeat because it makes them feel good.” And then that’s it. There’s no further examination of why diversity is a good thing or why Casey is wrong about “diversity” being a meaningless mantra. Casey gets the last word on the question of diversity.

As Weill noted on Twitter, the piece is framed as a “rare look” inside the group, but these groups are desperate for publicity. They don’t care if you splutter, “but isn’t that racist?” to them on TV, as long as you’re talking to them—instead of to anyone who’s been negatively affected by the rise of white supremacy. The Anti-Defamation League’s Carla Hill told the UK’s Independent last year that groups like IE have capitalized on media coverage in the past, saying they’re able to “maximize the effects of such a small action.”

A separate study by Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.

Of course, to view this as saying that absent right-wing propaganda media, the Republican Party would lose every election is misleading. What would happen in the real world is that the GOP would adjust to a less propaganda-filled landscape by altering its positions on issues.

A separate study by Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.

Of course, to view this as saying that absent right-wing propaganda media, the Republican Party would lose every election is misleading. What would happen in the real world is that the GOP would adjust to a less propaganda-filled landscape by altering its positions on issues.

I think the direction of causality in this piece is exactly backward. People tune in to Fox News, not for news, but for confirmation of their own conclusions. It strains credibility to presuppose an independent-minded seeker of truth would tune into Fox news for anything other than to shake his/her head in disgust.